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Simcha-Sophie
a lovely mishmash of opinions interspersed with moments of clarity and vision by a vegan lesbian feminist mystery-loving, history-loving reader and writer.
Currently reading
The More I Owe You: A Novel
The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World without Losing Your Way
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (Between Men--Between Women)
The Healing Earth
Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come
Long Gone: A Novel
As someone who's regularly enjoyed the Ellie Hatcher series, I found this stand-alone a great disappointment. Predictable, with a thread about a missing girl that feels irrelevant in the midst of the main plot. This thread is interesting, more so than the main story about a woman framed for a murder she didn't commit. But it's pointless, not suspenseful. I had a lot of trouble feeling sympathy for Alice, the framed main character, and thought that she got out of her dilemma far too easily. The suspense is minimal. And once it was mentioned that Alice's gloves were real mink-fur-lined, and once she went and ate foie gras (who needs to do that in fiction, unless they're an ignorant snob?) I was hoping she'd get found guilty.
The so-called surprise ending was not. It was predictable. Burke is a good writer, and most of the book moves along well, but the characters don't hold up and the last 1/3 of the novel is a cure for insomnia. I finished it because I was drawn in well enough to be interested in the outcome, but overall found it a waste of my time.